Dramatic technological breakthroughs have radically reshaped the energy industry. Will California allow its massive oil and natural gas resources to be developed? Or will the Golden State allow itself

For decades, the conventional wisdom about energy production was that the world was slowly but surely depleting its supplies of recoverable oil and natural gas. Someday, substitutes would have to be found to keep our cars going, our factories humming and our homes functioning.

This assumption – combined with environmental concerns about fossil-fuel pollution – has led to billions of dollars in privately and publicly funded research into and development of cleaner but costlier sources of energy in the United States and around the world. Especially as concerns about global warming escalated, this has led to a presumption that the era of fossil fuels was in decline.

But this presumption has been demolished by rapid technological advances in oil and natural gas extraction.

“From the high Arctic waters north of Norway to a shale field in Argentine Patagonia, from the oil sands of western Canada to deepwater oil prospects off the shores of Angola, giant new oil and gas fields are being mined, steamed and drilled with new technologies,” The New York Times reported in a 2011 special section on energy. “Put together, these fuels should bring hundreds of billions of barrels of recoverable reserves to market in coming decades and shift geopolitical and economic calculations around the world.”

Instead of the era of fossil fuels coming to a close, nations around the world are joining in a drilling boom that will proceed no matter how much the U.S. government or U.S. environmentalists object. After years of economic drift and high unemployment in much of the world, worries about climate change are taking a back seat to desire for growth.

“Use whatever hackneyed phrase you want, like tectonic shift or game-changer,” Edward L. Morse, global head of commodity research at Citigroup, told the Times. “These sources will dramatically change the energy supply outlook, and there is little debate about that.”

In the United States, one of these technologically transformed drilling processes – hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking – is already having a huge impact. In the process, high-powered streams of water mixed with chemicals and some solids are used to blast away rock formations and access natural-gas and oil supplies.

Contrary to many media reports, fracking is not new and has only in recent years been depicted as “controversial.” It was pioneered in the 1940s and has been used on more than 1 million wells. In the late 1970s, it played a key role in an unexpected U.S. natural-gas boom. For regulators in Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the presumption was that fracking was no dirtier or riskier than the typical heavy industry, and that its downsides could be addressed with proper oversight.

Now, however, fracking has become far more efficient thanks largely to advances in information technology. Drillers can take the equivalent of an intensely detailed MRI of square miles of underground, then know precisely where to aim their water cannons to free up supplies. There’s also more use of horizontal drilling – rather than vertical drilling – easing access to reserves.